Musical Motifs from Darksiders 1 and 3 in Genesis Main Theme

I think everyone who has played Darksiders: Genesis will agree that the soundtrack, composed by the marvelous Gareth Coker, and especially the main theme, is a masterpiece. But I wonder how many have noticed the appearance of musical themes from the soundtracks for Darksiders 1 and 3 (both composed by the awesome Chris Velasco) in it! I was delighted to discover these, and I’m thrilled to finally share the discovery.

A New Home for Themed Challenges and Halls of Fame – Redux

Five years after I wrote a post with the same title, announcing the move of the community archives of recorded Mass Effect 3 Multiplayer games from their original abode on the Bioware Social Network forums (that were being shut down at the time) to a dedicated website at www.prestaciouschallenges.com, I made my old dream come true and turned those archives into an online database accessible through a website of my own making at mehof.smehur.com.

This project has taken me over half a year (and counting) of daily work, fueled in equal parts by the intractable passion for programming and the undying fandom zeal, and laced with so much fun that I’m sure to remember it fondly forever. I’m so very glad and proud that it’s finally live (although it’s still not 100% done).

An Exercise in Self-Critique 4

This is the fourth post in the series where I critique the beginnings of my own stories, written long ago, and try to make them better. Here are the previous posts:

The usual method is to look at the first 250 words and examine/edit that excerpt in detail. But today I’ll do something different. I want to talk about some of the material that I cut from Thinker Traitor Soldier Spectre, the Mass Effect fanfiction novel I finished last year, and explain why it never made it into the final version.

Sentence Length Colorizer for Microsoft Word

In the image above is a famous quote from Gary Provost’s “100 Ways to Improve Your Writing”. One of them is to avoid stacking sentences of the same length one after another, since that makes for boring reading. Coloring the text based on sentence length is a useful visual tool to help an author or an editor identify such potentially boring passages and revise them. I found several web-based tools that do this (here’s an example) but I don’t much like the mechanics of pasting my text into a browser, possibly many times, as I revise. There might also be some commercial products that offer this service, but I didn’t research that.

Instead, I made my own sentence length colorizer for Microsoft Word, and if you’d like, you can use it too!

Themed Challenges Halls of Fame

This is the fourth in the series of posts about Mass Effect Multiplayer Challenges and Halls of Fame. Previously, I wrote about Platinum Solos Hall of Fame (PHOF) and fan-created Themed Challenges. Now it’s time to talk about the halls of fame for those same themed challenges (TCHOF).

Themed Challenges

This is the third in the series of posts about Mass Effect Multiplayer Challenges and Halls of Fame. In the previous one I wrote about Platinum Solos Hall of Fame. Here, I’ll talk about fan-created themed challenges.